Hello. My name is Dmitri Bobko and I work in IT out of Calgary, AB, Canada with certifications in VMware, Cisco, EMC, Microsoft among others and experience many different challenges every day. I always thought that a lot of the challenges that I deal with are unique as I can't always find the right answer online, so I always wanted to create a blog to contribute to the IT community. I hope the information you find here will be useful to solve your problem!

Friday, 3 February 2017

Growing a disk was always been so easy in the past, but with Nano server, you have to figure out a way to do it via PowerShell, as the option to Grow partition was grayed out for me in Server Manager (added as a remote server), and there is no DiskPart.

The procedure is pretty simple once you get it figured out. I took most of the information from another blog, but modified it a little bit to deal with CSV, as the other blog did not. I tried to find the link to the original blog but couldn't find it.

Anyways, here are the steps required:

Expand the LUN on your SAN first.

Connect to a remote PoweShell session on your Nano Server.

Execute Update-HostStorageCache to rescan for storage changes.

Type get-disk to get the information about the disks on your system. Take note of the disk number in the first colum. Let's assume I am working with disk 1.

Type get-parition -DiskNumber 1 this will show you the partitions on the disk in question. Take note of the Partition Number, in my case, it's 2.

Execute Get-PartitionSupportedSize -DiskNumber 1 -ParitionNumber 2 to verify that the SizeMin and SizeMax are different numbers. SizeMax should be the size of your underlying disk, whereas SizeMin would be your current parition size.

Set a variable to match SizeMax so that you can grow the partition to the full size of the disk. Execute the following command, $MaxSize = (Get-PartitionSupportedSize -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber
2).sizeMax

Finally run this command to change your disk to the size set in the MaxSize variable, Resize-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 2 -Size
$MaxSize

I battled with this for a few hours before I finally found the answer here. One of the users on there pointed me into the right direction, so I started looking. I have never been to this advance area of ESXi so I didn't even clue in to what the user on the forum was saying exactly, so I decided to get a couple of screen shots to make it easier, as inevitably there will be more and more people who move to Hyper-V and want to do V2V over from Vmware.

.
All you have to do if you get the error below is navigate to your vSphere client, select the host(s) where the VM you are trying to V2V resides, and navigate to the configuration tab, click on "System Resource Allocation", followed by Advanced at the top right.

Find "hostd" in the list of resources, and click on Edit Settings:

Set the Memory Limit to unlimited. Your V2V should now complete successfully.

It seems like the hostd process runs out of memory and crashes, causing the V2V process to fail and the host to temporarily disconnect. I would recommend you take the note of the previous memory limit and set it back to that value after you are all done with your V2Vs.